MINNEAPOLIS — The Guam-born siblings behind the vegan “meat” shop Herbivorous Butcher have a new cookbook that guides and encourages readers to make their own plant-based meat substitutes and offers a variety of recipes built upon proteins like “faux gras,” carrot lox and even a vegan porterhouse steak.
“The Herbivorous Butcher Cookbook,” released Aug. 16, is the culmination of a yearslong success story that began as a Minneapolis Farmers Market experiment and turned into a hit brick-and-mortar store in northeast Minneapolis that now ships nationwide — plus a south Minneapolis vegan restaurant called Herbie Butcher’s Fried Chicken.
The Star Tribune spoke with Aubry and Kale Walch about how to use vegan meat, whether people should go beyond Beyond Burgers at home, and why Spam is the hardest product to replicate. (It has something to do with the “plop.”)
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the process like to turn Herbivorous Butcher recipes into a cookbook?
Aubry: We actually started writing it the first summer of the pandemic. And I think the process of cooking all of this food at home and getting things written down, it was sort of therapeutic because of where the world was at that point. It was also very difficult. But Kale and I, at the time we lived in a fourplex and he lived upstairs and across the hall from me, so we would drop food off at each other’s doors while everyone was quarantining. It was labor-intensive, but really, really fun.